


Second Order Effects

by GoneGirl



Category: The Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-06 04:08:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8734342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoneGirl/pseuds/GoneGirl
Summary: They’ve been angling closer for a while, tightening their orbits around one another. It’s the kind of thing that makes her curious, more than anything; that’s always been her downfall. She doesn’t know how to connect with people, and when it happens without her having to try, she has to pick at it. Figure it out. To her detriment, usually, because she’s never been good at knowing when to stop.





	1. Because it was Career Day

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a hoarder, so I never delete anything. This is just a random collection of things I've written that don't fit anywhere. Chapters will all be one-shots. It's the island of misfit toys, guys.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the weird girl in the back who asks the question, the one who can’t keep her mouth shut. Linden would definitely like to shut it for her, especially when every pair of eyes in the room turns to her, like they’d all just noticed she’s there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-S2 AU.

“Yo, is it bring-your-kid-to-work day or somethin’?”

Linden glances up from the pages and pages of phone records stacked on her desk to see Holder peering out the vertical blinds of their office window with an expression on his face she’s come to recognize as boredom with a hankering to disturb some shit.

She rolls her chair sideways a little and leans over to see what he’s looking at. Out in the hall, Carlson and Chief Hanson are standing with a tight cluster of high school-aged kids. The chief is talking and gesticulating, Carlson has a twitchy look on his face like he’s dying to get a word in edgewise, and the kids seem to be mostly bored.

“Career day,” she tells Holder, rolling her chair back to her desk. “They bring in some high school kids, tour them around. Come on, would you take some of these?”

She waves a stack of phone records at him because they have six months’ worth to go through and, so far, he’s been less than helpful. He spares her a quick glance over his shoulder. 

“Nah, you seem like you got it. Don’t wanna mess up your flow or nothin’.”

“Holder,” she says flatly.

“Linden,” he mimics, quirking a smile at her. “Hey, I brought you coffee this morning. Don’t that buy me a stay?”

She drops the stack onto his desk. He goes back to staring out the window and mutters something she can’t quite make out. She knows he hates this kind of thing, trying to match dates and times with suspect travel patterns. It’s a seemingly endless and often fruitless game of connect-the-dots, and anything they find has a decent chance of getting thrown out in court anyway because cell tower data is notoriously iffy. He’d rather spend his time throwing his weight around in the interrogation room, but cases aren’t always won that way. She thinks about the kids out in the hall, how they probably showed up at the precinct that morning expecting to be dazzled. They always do, just like they always leave a little deflated at the end of the day, because the truth is that real police work is pretty mundane.

“Imma bring some of them pipsqueaks up in here,” Holder announces. “Drop some sweet knowledge on ’em. You wanna tag team?”

Linden’s irritation ratchets up another notch. “No,” she says firmly. “Would you just —”

“They look bored as fuck,” he interrupts. “It’s a public service. BRB, partner.”

“Holder,” she hisses as he opens the door, but he disappears into the hall without another word.

She watches him sidle up to the chief, all swagger and confidence despite the fact he’s dressed like a bum in front of his boss and his boss’s boss’s boss. She stops watching when he tries to lead the chief through some kind of convoluted handshake and positions her chair so no one in the hall can see her. She’s always hated career day. If she doesn’t lay low, she invariably ends up getting strong-armed into the Q&A session, because she’s “a senior officer with great experience to share,” which really just means she checks the diversity box and the chief trusts her not to say anything stupid. But small talk is painful for her in the best of times, nevermind when they have an active case and she has a million better things she could be doing. The kids always ask the same questions anyway.

_ Have you shot your gun? Can I hold your gun? Have you killed anyone? What’s the craziest case you’ve ever investigated? What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen? Could I be arrested for blah blah blah? Asking for a friend. _

She tries to injure Holder with her eyes as he re-enters their office with a giant grin on his face and four kids in tow, but her laser beams go right over his head. Or he chooses to ignore them.

So she smiles tightly and nods a hello only because he introduces her (“Detective Sarah Linden, crime fighter extraordinaire and general badass”) and then goes back to the phone records and tries to ignore the little show he puts on. 

But it’s impossible, and not only because their office is way too small to comfortably contain six people. Holder’s loud. He demands attention. He charms them with his usual inappropriate commentary. He shows them crime scene photos they have no business seeing. He goes on and on about what it’s like to be a detective. 

“See, me, I went right into undercover,” he’s saying, half-sitting on the filing cabinet. “Did my time with Seattle’s finest tweakers and skeezers and shit rats before I got my gold shield. But Linden here, she did the whole patrol thing for, what, five years? And now she’s the best detective we got.”

Kiss ass, she thinks to herself, but she casts him a smile anyway. 

“You best keep your noses clean,” Holder continues, going all stern-dad on them. “You guys ever find yourselves stuck in one of those little interrogation rooms with me and her, it ain’t gonna be good.”

They laugh nervously, and he moves on to a whole rant about chain of custody, so she starts to tune him out again until one of the kids, a fidgety girl standing at the back of the group, interrupts him to ask a question.

“Are you guys allowed to date?” 

Linden’s ears prick, and her head snaps up. Holder getting hit on by a hormonal teenager is too good to miss.

But she realizes quickly that’s not what’s happening. The girl has the blissfully ignorant expression of someone without an ounce of self-awareness, the slightly off-kilter look of a perpetual misfit. She looks like someone who constantly says the wrong thing at the wrong time and doesn’t know she’s doing it. 

Holder looks thrown off. His leg is starting to jitter slightly. Annoyed or nervous.

“What, like, civilians?” he asks. “Well ... yeah. I mean we don’t have a ton of free time, but —”

“No,” the girl corrects. She blinks rapidly, looking from Holder to Linden. “I meant each other. Like, could you two date?”

The other kids exchange unsubtle, long-suffering glances with one another, confirming Linden’s read on the girl as the weirdo who can’t keep her mouth shut. Linden would definitely like to shut it for her, especially when every pair of eyes in the room turns to her.

And then, to her total horror, she feels a blush warming her cheeks. Four curious kids, five if you count Holder, wait to see what she’ll say, and she doesn’t miss Holder’s double-take when he notices the flush in her face.

The silence stretches out to the point that it feels wrong and strange, and she realizes it’s because Holder would normally have saved her by now, filling the void with his ramblings. But there’s nothing from him. No jokes. No smartass remarks at her expense. No macho posturing.

So she levels a stare at the girl and snaps, “No. Against the rules.”

The girl blinks and looks back towards Holder, and Linden stares down at the phone records again. She can see Holder in her peripheral vision, watching her. She feels physically tense. Her heart is starting to pump quicker. Her skin feels hot. She’s having a flight response. And that is fucking ridiculous.

Holder’s voice jerks her back into the moment. It sounds unnaturally loud.

“Uh, actually,” he says, “it ain’t  _ strictly _ against the rules. More like ... frowned upon.”

Now she looks at him, and his face is completely unreadable. He’s not wrong - she knows the rule book well enough to know where the grey areas are. Section 5.130, Employee Relationships. Tried and tested, by her. So she thinks for a second that he must be referring to that, that someone told him about her and Skinner, and for some reason he’s just chosen this moment to let her know he knows.

But his leg is still jittering, and he’s staring at her from across the room — and it makes her wonder. She knows she should leave it alone, file it away, just like she does every time there’s a casual touch that lingers too long, a glance that has extra layers to it, the occasional joke that doesn’t land because there’s too much truth in it. 

Her innate curiosity gets the better of her, and she can't resist asking him, “What, did you look it up?”

The muscles in his jaw clench briefly, and he crosses his arms, shrugging. “Maybe. It’s good to know, alright?”

Now he’s the one avoiding her eyes. He’s clearing his throat and starting up his speech on evidence control again, and she’s thinking — what the hell just happened? What kind of bizarre breadcrumb trail led us to this point?

The sight of the chief darkening their doorway isn’t something she’s usually happy about, but at the moment, she’s pretty fucking relieved to see him poking his head in.

“Corrupting young minds, Detective Holder?” he asks gruffly, smiling.

“Never, sir,” Holder replies, smiling back. It’s such an odd, lukewarm response, especially by Holder’s standards, that she knows for sure he’s rattled.

The kids follow the chief out, leaving behind a quiet that’s so heavy and palpable she feels like it’s sitting on her shoulders, compressing her spine. She can hear everything with extra clarity — snippets of conversation from the hall, a gust of wind blowing rain against the window, the squeak of the kids’ tennis shoes against the cheap linoleum.

She watches Holder fold his long frame into his desk chair, grabbing the stack of phone records she’d left on his desk and reclining as far as the chair will let him, swivelling it so she’s not directly in his line of sight.

“Yo,” he says casually, flipping a few pages. “You gave me April. You do February and March already?”

She almost takes the out he’s giving her. She wants to. She should. But instead, she hears herself say, “Frowned upon, huh? Is that what it actually says?” 

He looks over at her, not bothering to mask the surprise on his face that she isn’t just pretending the last few minutes didn’t happen.

“Who the fuck knows?” he drawls. “I haven’t read that shit.”

She nods, eyes back on her phone records, letting him have his lie. She feels like she screwed something up, somehow. Missed something, made a mess of something without even knowing she was doing it. She isn’t wired for this, she doesn’t know how to navigate when things get emotionally thorny. She always zigs when she should be zagging.

“I mean, you should probably check,” Holder continues. “There are some  _ fine _ new recruits comin’ in. Right in your preferred age bracket, too.”

She huffs a laugh at that. “That was one time,” she mutters. She will forever regret telling him about the time she had a fling with a rookie patrol officer like, four years ago. She never would have mentioned it in the first place, except the they ran into the guy one day and it took Holder all of two seconds to figure it out.

“Whatever, Linden,” he says. “You let me know what you learn, once you read up on the do’s and don’ts.”

Her gaze flickers back up to his, and something in the way he’s looking at her makes her both exceptionally wary and impossibly intrigued at the same time.

“Will do,” she replies, going for casual. She misses by a long shot.


	2. Because Jack Wanted Seafood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So, uh, do you want to meet us for dinner tonight?” she asks abruptly.
> 
> “A date with the Lindens?” he asks, grinning at her. “One hundred percent. Wouldn’t miss it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-S2 AU

Holder is pretty sure Linden thinks she’s a superhuman when she’s behind the wheel — always trying to do three things at once, plus drive, plus boss him around about this or that. Right now her phone’s ringing, and she’s started her standard juggling act: jamming her coffee between her knees — because the cupholders in this tincan are overflowing with garbage — steering and holding her smoke with her left hand, trying to answer the phone with her right hand. All while navigating holiday shoppers and a nasty rain-snow-slush mix.

He snatches the phone away from her before she can answer it. “Give me that. Damn. Could you keep one hand on the wheel at least?”

“I _am_. I have a system,” she protests. “Just tell me who it is. Don’t answer it.”

He’s already opened her old-ass flip phone, because it’s Jack. “Little Man!” he says happily, ignoring Linden’s now-empty hand held out towards him. “Haven’t talked to you in ages, son. What’s good?”

“Hey, Holder,” Jack replies. “Can you please tell my mom to read her texts?” He sounds exactly like Linden when she gets exasperated.

“Aww shit, she don’t text you back neither? Thought it was just me.” Holder slumps sideways in his seat a bit so Linden can’t grab the phone back, grinning at the way she rolls her eyes. Nothing beats hassling her, squeezing out an eye roll or an exclamation, or better than that, a laugh. She’s such an easy mark. He’s been on a roll all morning.

He shoots the shit with Jack for a bit. He’s coming into town for Christmas. Apparently, Linden is gonna pick him up from the airport when his flight lands in a couple hours. And apparently, she’s taking the whole afternoon off to hang out with him. Holder can’t remember a single other time she’s done that when Jack’s come in from Chicago. He’s so surprised by this information that he forgets to let Linden actually talk to her kid, and hangs up when Jack says he has to go.

“Holder,” she sighs, a long-suffering sound. “What’d he say?”

“To answer your texts, for one,” he tells her.  “And his flight’s delayed half an hour. So, FYI. For when you _pick him up_ later. And yo, when were you planning on telling me you’re gonna be AWOL this afternoon?”

She shrugs, angling a glance his way. “I thought I did,” she says.

"Naw," he teases her, drawing it out. “I would _definitely_ remember you telling me you were gonna drive out to the _actual airport_ to pick Jack up. Yellow Cab’s gonna wonder what happened to their best fare. And then take the afternoon off, too? Damn.”

As soon as he stops talking, he can tell he should have shut up about ten seconds back. Linden’s ominously quiet. He takes in the hard set of her jaw and the way she’s staring straight ahead and feels himself deflate a bit, his mood swinging south. It ain’t the first time he’s ridden that high too hard, that particular buzz he gets from teasing her. And he’s used to her being mercurial — he kinda digs that about her — but not when he’s the reason for it.

She holds her hand out for the phone, still not saying anything. He passes it over, but he hangs onto it so that she has to pay attention to him.  “Yo, I didn’t mean … ” he starts, then falters, stuck on what to tell her. He can’t say sorry for shit, any more than she can.

“I didn’t mean nothin’ by that,” he finishes lamely. There’s an apology in there somewhere.

She gives the phone a tug, then another one, so he lets go. “I’m just trying harder,” she replies flatly. Defensive. “With Jack. You know? I’m trying to try harder.”

Holder puffs out his cheeks and swallows a sigh. Fuck. So he didn’t even piss her off, he just made her feel like shit about herself. Great.

Traffic is one giant clusterfuck downtown, and it’s taking forever to crawl back towards the precinct. He watches Linden out of the corner of his eye, trying to figure out how to backtrack. He actually thinks she’s a great mom. And he knows she’s been trying harder. And Jack probably knows, too. But he doesn’t think any of those comments will land at this particular moment, so he just starts talking about something random, before the silence gets weird. Weirder.

“So, uh, you do a big turkey dinner? For Christmas?” he tries, careful to keep his tone neutral — no hint of a Linden-don’t-cook joke anywhere. And he’s actually interested, because she was off on her short-lived retirement this time last year, so he has no idea what she does.

Linden shoves her cigarette butt into the garbage in the cupholders — which is a fire hazard, but whatever, he ain’t about to point that out. She shakes her head slightly. “Regi does it. You’d be surprised what you can cook in that little boat oven.” She pauses, glancing over at him, and he gets the sense she’s giving him a pass for being a dick. “What do you do?” she asks.

“Me? Liz puts on a whole spread. She does good. I make the pie,” he adds, because he wants to see her smile, or something close to it. And also because it’s true.

“You make the pie,” Linden repeats slowly.

“Damn straight. Pecan. It’s fucking _good,_ too. I’ll save you a piece.”

She’s quiet for a moment longer, and then she asks, “Where’d you learn that?” Her voice is full of curiosity.

Holder shifts in his seat, digging through his jacket pocket for a cigarette. He didn’t really think this through. He figured she’d take his pie comment for what it was — his stupid-ass version of a peace offering — so all he expected was a little jab about him watching the Food Network or reading O Magazine or something.

Normally he doesn’t mind telling Linden stuff like this. Because she gets it. She gets him. He can tell her shit about his past and she doesn’t pity him or come out with platitudes or any of the stuff other people do. He just ain’t particularly in the mood to talk about it now, is all, when the holidays are already vomiting all over him, making him remember stuff he’d rather forget.

He pops a smoke in his mouth while he pats himself down for his lighter. “My moms, believe it or not,” he starts, the words feeling odd in his mouth. They never talk about his mom, just like they never talk about hers. “There was a whole lotta shit she did wrong, but she did pie right. She was a Southern girl. It’s like, in the blood, or something.”

He flicks his lighter and cracks the window, aiming his first puff out into the rainy sky. “She’d get in these moods sometimes,” he continues. “For whatever reason. She’d just get it into her head that she was gonna start fresh, I figure. Who knows. But she’d make these huge spreads. Probably lifted half the food.”

He can still see his mom tearing through that miniature kitchen in their apartment, giving him instructions, stacking ingredients everywhere. Slightly manic, mostly happy, definitely high as a kite. He always got the feeling she wasn’t even doing it for him and Liz. She was doing it for herself, maybe to prove she still could, that she wasn’t a total fuckup. And he used to get sucked in, watching her, helping her, because it was one of the only ways he could get her to acknowledge he existed, at that point. That or be a total juvenile delinquent, which he was pretty good at, too.

He doesn’t say any of that, though. “She was a good cook, when she bothered,” he says instead. “I’ll give her that.”

Linden slows down for a yellow light, and she doesn’t speak again until it cycles through to green.

“Was?” she asks quietly. And he knows she isn’t asking if his mom can still knock out a six course meal, because he obviously doesn’t know. She’s asking whether she’s alive or not.

Holder takes a long drag, stalling, because he doesn’t know that, either.

“Was. Is. Who knows.”

He hates how hollow and sad his voice sounds. It’s been almost twenty years since his mom up and left. Last he heard, she was back in Georgia, but it ain’t like she sends Christmas cards.

They’re stopped again. Linden sighs, long and slow, and leans her elbow on the door. She props her forehead in her hand, tilting her head to look at him. She’s got an expression on her face he sees from time to time when they’ve jostled each other a bit too hard, shaken something loose that was safely bottled up and buried. It’s something like solidarity.

“So, uh, do you want to meet us for dinner tonight?” she asks abruptly.

He blinks at the change in topic, surprised. “A date with the Lindens?” he asks, grinning at her. “One hundred percent. Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Okay,” she says, smiling back. “Good. I mean, Jack wants to see you. For some reason.”

He preens a bit, giving her an _obviously_ look, and she chuckles, reaching back to adjust her ponytail. It didn’t need adjusting from what he can see, but what does he know?

“He wants seafood,” she says. “You know anywhere good?”

He leans his head back against the headrest, pretending to ponder their options. “I’ll think on it,” he replies. “But yo, seafood is _full_ of mercury and shit. And you know fish farming ain’t right.”

The eye roll she gives him is right on cue.

*** * * * ***

He finds a mediterranean restaurant near Pike Place that fits the bill. He gets there first, and as the hostess walks him to a corner booth, he starts to second guess his choice, noticing too late how cozy the atmosphere is. It’s a tiny place, the tables packed close together. Warm, dim lighting. Those little string lights running along the ceiling. All couples. Candles. Fucking romantic. Like, actually date-like.

But he forgets about that when Linden and Jack show up, because Linden looks happy. She’s smiling so big having Jack beside her that his heart hurts a bit. And the low lighting is almost making her glow, drawing out the red in her hair and the freckles in her skin, and that’s not horrible either.

He ignores Jack’s outstretched fist and grabs him up in a man-hug instead. It’s been almost a year since he’s seen this kid. He is _way_ taller than his mom now.

“Damn, son, you _grew_. What’re they feeding you out in the Midwest?”

“Steaks, mostly,” Jack says. He looks around the restaurant, nodding his approval. “Nice choice. Mom would’ve taken me to Red Lobster.”

Linden sighs, but she’s smiling. “Keep it up, and I’ll make you pay,” she tells him.

It’s both completely comfortable and completely foreign to him, sitting with Linden and Jack, in a nice restaurant, enjoying cold beer and warm food and entertaining conversation. They’re chatty, telling him story after story — Jack about Chicago, his mom getting nostalgic and talking about when he was little. She laughs, a lot, probably more than he’s ever seen her laugh. And when she’s on her second beer she starts pulling all sorts of mushy mom moves, like grabbing Jack up in a hug in the middle of dinner.

Jack just looks at Holder, like, _moms, what are you gonna do?_

Holder sneaks the waitress his credit card, and Linden gives him shit about paying. He tells her she can get the next one, and no, the Wendy’s drive-thru don’t count.

When she leaves to go to the bathroom, Jack leans over to Holder conspiratorially. “Check this out,” he says excitedly, scrolling through the photos on his phone. “My dad has this box of old pictures, and I found this gem.”

Jack holds the phone out, and Holder chokes on his beer. “Is that —” he sputters.

“Yup.”

There she is. Sarah Linden, young Seattle grunge queen. She’s sitting on the front steps of a house beside a guy Holder recognizes as Little Man’s pops — still a fucking square, even back then. But Linden, she’s all sass and attitude and mid-90s plaid, baggy jeans, her bright hair shorter and popping out from under an oversized Mariners ballcap.

“Oh _snap_ ,” Holder says, grinning. He zooms in on her face, trying to match it to the Linden he knows so well, and it’s not that hard. Still the same piss and vinegar, maybe more energetic about it back then. It’s an old photo, and her face is shadowed by the hat, but he can see a light in her eyes, a little half-smile on her mouth. She looks happy.

He doesn’t notice the real 2016 version sliding back into the booth until she’s already beside him again. She looks between Holder and Jack for a second, before she notices the phone, and her eyes pop wide open when she realizes what Holder’s looking at. She snatches the phone out of his hand so quick he doesn’t even see her coming — it’s like some kind of kung fu move — then leans back into the corner of the booth out of reach. “Jack!” she exclaims, half-admonishing, half-laughing as she squints at the image. “Where did you _get_ this?”

“At Dad’s,” Jack says, laughing as he watches her mess with the screen. “And I have the original, so deleting it won’t help.”

Linden screws her mouth up in a way that tells him she’s trying not to laugh, scrutinizing her teenage self. She hands the phone back to Jack reluctantly, then frowns at Holder when he motions for it back and makes a show of texting the picture to himself. Because he’s gotta have it. It’s too amazing.

“What’re you gonna do with that?” she demands.

Holder just shrugs, even though he’s thinking — posters, t-shirts, mugs, buttons. “The sky’s the limit,” he tells her. “I had no clue you were such a punk back in the day.”

“I was not,” she scoffs. “Everyone looked like that.”

“Whatever you say,” Jack says, exchanging a look with Holder. He edges out of the booth, grabbing his jacket. “I’m gonna go call Mia before it gets too late. Meet you guys outside?”

“You lay that groundwork, son,” Holder calls after him, and Linden shoots him a dirty look.

“Can you not?” she asks.

“Come on. He’s fifteen. You know —”

“ _Stop,_ ” she says loudly. “I’m not inviting you for dinner again.”

Holder leans towards her a bit, angling his phone so she can see he’s set her photo as his wallpaper.

She looks incredulous. “Are you serious? Holder, come on. Get rid of that.”

“ _Hells_ no. I’m showing everyone at the station.” He looks at teenage Linden again, then at the real thing, back and forth over and over like he’s trying really hard to compare them. He knows she ain’t really that annoyed when she starts laughing into her beer glass.

“How old were you here?” he asks.

She leans over slightly, looking at the image again. “I met Greg when I was sixteen, and that was in front of my last foster home. So probably sixteen. Seventeen, maybe. God, we look so young.”

Holder figures she’s a few years older than him — he ain’t gonna ask the question to find out for sure — and he looks at teenage Linden, wondering what it was he was doing back then, on that day. Skipping school? Smoking weed? Tussling with Ed, that asshole his mom was with for a couple years? Probably all three.

Maybe he’s still a bit tender from talking about his mom earlier, or maybe it’s the beer, or maybe it’s just that he hasn’t had a night like this in way too long — but he looks back up at Linden and drops the jokes for a second.

“Wish I’d known you back then,” he says. It’s not the first time he’s thought about it, wondered what life would have been like if he’d had her on his side as a kid. But her face shifts a little, goes kind of flat and cautious, so he adds a joke to take the weight off the moment. “Woulda saved my _finest_ moves for you.”

“Oh really,” she says, eyebrows up.

“You know it.”

She cocks her head, spinning her mostly-empty beer glass. Then she leans forward, just slightly. Barely a movement at all. Someone else might not even have noticed. But he does.

“Like what?” she asks, her eyes flicking from her glass up to his. “What moves?”

She looks curious more than anything. But there’s something in her tone, a bit of subtext that feels new to him. Something untested. And there are about a million little voices in his head telling him different things. Like, get your head straight, because you’ve gotta be reading this wrong. Or, dip a toe in, but tread carefully. But the loudest one is saying: This is fucking interesting. Follow this up immediately.

“Trade secret,” he hedges, wiggling his eyebrows at her. “I’ll fill Jack in, though.”

“Gross,” she mutters, pulling a face.

He leans back against the booth, noticing for the first time that she’s wearing a nice sweater. Not one of her usual nappy ones. It’s soft-looking. Light blue. Loose enough that it’s skewed sideways a little, exposing part of her shoulder. And he could probably see pretty far down it, if she leaned forward.

He clears his throat. “Naw, full disclosure — I had _no_ moves,” he says. “First time I gave a girl flowers was at a bush party. I picked ’em myself, real hunter-gatherer like. Added in some greenery and everything. ’Cept it turned out it was poison ivy. So she wasn’t too impressed.”

Linden laughs, a quick little giggle he hasn’t really heard before. “Well,” she says quietly. “I’m immune to poison ivy.”

Her eyes are bright in the dim light; her face is soft, unguarded. He wants to bottle this feeling. The way she’s watching him, the pale glow of her skin in the semi-darkness, how neither of them are saying anything, just lingering in this strange little moment that’s both nothing and something at the same time.

A dish breaks in the kitchen, startling him into speaking. “No shit,” he says quietly, and he’s referring to the poison ivy thing, but it could apply to life in general right now.

“Mmm hmm,” she says, taking the last swig of her beer.

“How do you even know a thing like that?”

There’s a sassy little smirk on her face when she lowers her glass. “I met Greg at a bush party.”

He feels like he has no control over his facial muscles. He has no idea what look he’s giving her. And then he blurts out, “You’re a great mom.”

It isn’t what he wants to say, at all. It’s totally out of context. It sounds so fucking stupid. But even if they sat here staring at each other all night, he couldn’t sort through all the static in his head well enough to verbalize the shit he’s feeling.

Her eyes flicker around his face, lingering half a second too long on his mouth, but it’s enough to make his tongue dry and his neck hot. Hotter. Because it’s been heating up since Linden went and put the image of her teenage self getting it on out in the woods in his head, even if it was with that fucking deadbeat.

The waitress picks that exact moment to come by and collect their empty glasses. It’s a not so subtle cue to get the fuck out, and Linden is suddenly all action, grabbing her jacket and making noise about how they should go and Jack’s waiting.

He really digs how flustered she looks. He wants to bottle that, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there's a chance I Canadian-ized this. Up here, bush parties = kids + wilderness + booze + fire + at least one guy with a pickup full of beer and a good sound system. Google tells me getting turnt up in the woods is a Canadian thing. Honestly I just assumed it happens everywhere. I mean, it kind of should, am I right?


	3. Because I don't like small spaces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He tries to figure out how to tell her that he wants her to talk to him about stuff, especially because he knows she doesn’t talk to anyone about hardly anything. But he doesn’t know how to say it, because even talking about the fact that she can talk to him makes her skittish.
> 
> Post-S2 AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder that these chapters are all standalone little stories - in case it feels like I'm writing backwards :)

“By the way,” Linden says, “I’m gonna be in late tomorrow. I have a thing.”

They’re sitting in the car in the dark on Beacon Hill, watching the back door of a bar, waiting for a guy by the improbable name of Tee Martin to come out so they can tail him. Holder’s been a murder cop for six months now, and he feels like fifty percent of working homicide is staring at a door, waiting for a guy. And doing paperwork. And being exhausted. Constantly, completely exhausted.

“A thing?” he repeats, intrigued. It’s not exactly standard Linden behavior to take a morning off in the middle of a case.

“Yep,” she replies. She’s not looking at him. 

“What thing?”

“Just a thing,” she mutters. Her words are clipped, her voice sounding small and compact. She shifts in her seat and takes a sip of her coffee, which is hours old and probably cold as hell. He looks at her closer, wondering what’s so important that she’s trying to dodge him. 

“A thing,” he muses into the silence after a minute. He can usually annoy her into telling him stuff if he just times it well and asks the right obnoxious question. “I get it. It’s like, a female thing, right? Like one of those medical-type tests you gotta do every year, or whatnot?”

Linden turns her head towards him slowly, her face set. He's pretty sure she thinks he’s the most annoying person alive. 

“Or,” he continues, “is it like one of those —”

“It’s an MRI,” she says. “It’s nothing, alright? It’s not a big deal.”

He blinks, surprised. She hasn’t mentioned anything that he can think of, no bum knee or bad shoulder. He scans her reflexively, but he doesn’t have x-ray vision, despite all those years of praying for it as a kid, and she’s not giving anything away. Just sittin’ there trying to look relaxed, head back against the headrest, shoulders down, fingers of her left hand drumming the steering wheel, the other hand resting on top of her coffee cup, all casual and shit.

“What for?” he asks, point blank. 

She readjusts in her seat and takes another sip of cold coffee before she answers. “My head.”

He keeps his face neutral, but he can’t stop himself from repeating this information. Like he’s checking to see if he heard right. “Your head?”

She pins him with a stare. “I told you. It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah, whatever. Brain MRIs ain’t exactly by-the-way shit either, Linden.”

She huffs a laugh, wedging her coffee into the cup holder. “What are you, my mom?”

He doesn’t touch that one, turning to look out the window instead. He likes to think he’s worked with Linden long enough to know when he can push it, and when he can’t, but she’s still unpredictable as fuck. 

“It’s from the casino,” she says a while later, out of nowhere. She mimes the knock on the head, as if he forgot she got clocked by those assholes. “I think, anyway. The left side of my body goes numb sometimes.”

He carefully considers how to react, because saying the wrong thing will just make her clam right up about it. He’s weighing how she phrased that, itching to know how she defines “sometimes,” and “numb,” and “the left side of my body.” And he wants to say,  _ what the actual fuck _ , because this is a pretty big deal, even if she wants to pretend it isn’t.

He clears his throat instead, leaning forward and stretching out his back. “You really gotta start drinking organic milk. For your bone mass. And I ain’t about to make a joke about you being old,” he assures her, grinning at the way she’s frowning at him. “Next time. Next time. Don’t worry. I’m just saying — Chief Jackson sent, like, six motherfuckers to beat me up, and I’m just fine. Organic milk, Linden. I’ll hook you up.”

She stares at him for a second, then her mouth pulls up in half a smile. He even gets a little laugh out of her. “You are something else,” she mutters. 

He grins back, knocking her hand on her coffee cup with his knee.

“So you wanna hear my joke about you being old?”

* * * * *

He can’t get any more information out of her, even though he tosses a few more casual questions at her. He figures — why not? He already has the most important information, so anything else would be a bonus, and the worst that’ll happen is that she’ll get pissy, and that happens like ten times a day anyway. 

But she won’t talk details on the numbness, and she gets exasperated when he offers to drive her to the appointment. 

“I can drive myself,” she says, her tone clipped. “It’s  _ fine _ , Holder. Leave it alone.”

So he shows up to work the next day and tries not to stare at her empty desk too much, but it just weirds him out that she isn’t there, that something might actually be wrong with her. It puts him in a mood. And it doesn’t help that he barely slept four hours and there’s so much shit to do, and Carlson keeps hovering in the hallway outside their office, coming by randomly to breathe down Holder’s neck about various shit — how good was the info that sketchy-ass informant Fitzy gave them, and have they found that unfindable fuckstick Tee Martin, and how close are they to an arrest?

He curses Linden for bailing today, of all days, when Carlson’s starting to take heat on this one from the Captain and the Chief and turning into a twitchy little bitch about it. He’s debating leaving the office just to avoid him when Linden’s number lights up his phone, and he thinks — finally. Thank Christ.

“‘Sup, Linden?” he greets her, peering quickly into the hall to make sure Carlson isn’t standing there, because he’s pretty sure he has no clue that Linden’s been getting her brain scanned — and he isn’t about to be the one to let that piece of info slip. “You coming in, or what? Carlson is losing his shit.”

“Hi,” she says. “So. I need you to come get me.”

She sounds too bright and happy, just a hint of a slur dragging out her words. He knows right away she’s high.

“What happened? You okay?”

“I’m fine. They made me take something to relax. So, I can’t drive now.”

She sounds lightly, harmlessly annoyed. Xanax, he’s betting. No way Linden would be this laid-back about getting her keys taken away otherwise. He grabs his jacked off the back of his chair, glad for an excuse to get out of dodge.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the hospital.”

“Yeah, I got that,” he says, smiling. “Which one?”

“Oh. Harborview.” 

“Okay, Miss Daisy. Be right there.”

* * * * *

He parks near Emergency and makes his way through the hallways, immediately wishing he’d had the foresight to figure out where Radiology was before he parked. If she’s really messed up, it’s going to take forever to get her back to the car. He has no idea what to expect out of her. The only other time he saw her doped up was in the psych ward, and that was pretty fucking awful.

Inside the Radiology waiting room, he peers around the giant admitting desk looking for Linden. It’s busy — most of the chairs are full — and he doesn’t spot her until he scans the room a second time. She’s sitting in the corner, kind of tilted to the side a little, chin propped in her hand and her elbow leaning on the back of the chair next to her. And her hair — it’s down. Undone, or whatever. A giant mass of red waves. It’s kind of all he can see for a second.

She sees him standing there and perks up. He watches her carefully as she stands up and walks towards him. She doesn’t look too bad. Walking fine, but definitely a bit loopy, judging by the fact that she’s smiling, and her eyes are wide open, her pupils huge and dark.

“Hey,” she says. Her hands are in her jacket pockets, and she nudges his elbow with hers. “What’s up?”

“Yeah, uh, not much,” he replies, scratching the back of his neck. “You, uh, you got everything?”

“Yep,” she says, heading for the door. She starts walking the wrong way when she gets to the hall, so he hovers an arm out to redirect her the other way.

“I totally slept in there,” she reports brightly as they walk. She sounds completely unlike the Linden he’s used to. “And when they woke me up, they told me I can’t drive.”

“Shoulda let me drive you,” he sing-songs, being extra obnoxious about it to see how far her tolerance for his bullshit has shifted.

“Probably,” she agrees. “You’re right.” 

So, a lot, he thinks. It has shifted a lot.

He’s letting her walk slightly ahead of him so he can keep an eye on her, and he can’t stop looking at her hair. Hair isn’t like, a thing for him — he didn’t think so, anyway — but then he’s never seen hair like Linden’s. It’s bouncing, catching the light, looking really soft and floating around her face. Maybe it’s time for him to think about dating again. He’s got a year of sobriety now. Maybe this celibacy thing has run its course if he’s catching feelings from fucking  _ hair _ .

“They also made me take out my hair tie,” Linden says, like she’s reading his mind. “Because of the tiny little piece of metal on it, you know? Magnets or something. I don’t know where it is.”

“Shoot,” he says absently, watching her pat down her pockets for it, hoping she’s too out of it to find it. She gets distracted when they pass the gift shop, veering towards it.

“I need to eat something,” she mumbles.

He reaches out to snag her jacket. “We’ll hit a drive-thru. Come on, Miss Daisy.”

She stops walking, standing right in the middle of the automatic doors at the entrance of the hospital. “Is that another joke about me being old?” she asks. “I’m not that much older than you.”

He blinks, a bit surprised, because it wasn't a dig, but she looks legitimately bothered. 

“Nah, don’t listen to me,” he tells her, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I only think about the shit I say, like, a nanosecond before I say it.”

She frowns. “I know.”

He keeps his mouth shut as they walk the rest of the way to the car. He feels like he can’t quite get a handle on her like this — she’s dodging and weaving in and out of predictable Linden behavior. 

She’s pretty quiet once they start driving, leaning her head on the window. She starts talking about their case, saying that she thinks they should check the security camera of the bank up the street from where the body was found, and did he file the request for the warrant to search Tee Martin’s apartment?

“Yeah, I did. First thing this morning. Judge Harrison’s in court til three today, so, still waiting,” he says, pulling into a Wendy’s. He rolls down the window to order, and he’s just turning to ask her what she wants when she leans over, her elbow on his forearm and her head with all its hair right up in his face. Apparently she is just going to order herself, and he tries not to be too much of a bitch about how uncomfortable he is, but Linden never,  _ ever _ gets up in his space like this, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He can smell her shampoo, hear her hair sliding over the nylon of her jacket, feel various parts of her body pressing into various parts of his.

“I need two junior bacon cheeseburgers,” she calls through the window, “and a side of fries, and a small Frosty. No, a medium Frosty.”

She leans back over, nodding her chin at him. “You want anything?”

“Nope,” he says, and he’s glad his voice still sounds normal, because he feels awkward as hell for some reason. He can feel little hot patches springing up on his skin where she’d been leaning on him a second before. Probably some kind of fucked up tactile response to being touched by a woman after being out of the game for so long. Yeah, he thinks, it is most definitely time to start dating again.

He drives them around to the pickup window, darting a glance at her out of the corner of his eye. She’s looking at him curiously. 

“Yo, you are next-level right now,” he teases her, grinning.

She smiles at him across the console. “I’m pretty fucked up,” she admits. 

He snorts out a laugh at that, because she is pretty fucking endearing, too. 

“You take a whole bar, or what?” he asks as they wait for her food. Which he pays for. Which she does not thank him for.

She looks at him blankly. “I have no idea what you’re asking me right now.”

“A bar is — nevermind. I’m kidding.”

“What is it?”

“It’s 2 milligrams of Xanax. It’s shaped like a bar.” 

“Oh,” she says, nodding. “I took two.”

“ _ Two? _ ” he says. There’s no way. “Like this?” He holds his thumb and his finger up, spacing them about an inch apart, about the size of a bar. She squints at him and leans over, carefully moving his fingers closer together until they’re only spacing a tiny little amount. Her fingertips are smooth and warm on his skin.

“Like that,” she says. “Two of them like that.”

“Ah. So probably, like, a milligram,” he tells her, enjoying his greater drug knowledge. “Yo, that’s still a lot for you. You go all apeshit in there, or what?”

Her eyes flash, her face going hard. “I don’t like small spaces.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, holding his hands up. “Chill, Linden.”

* * * * *

She gets through one of her burgers and all of her fries before they even get to her apartment, and then she starts getting sleepy, slumped against the door, her hand lying halfway inside the Wendy’s bag.

He parks in front of her building and goes around to open her door for her, because she’s not making any moves to get out.

“Hey,” he says, catching her by the shoulder as she slumps his way. “Come on. Rise and shine.”

She groans, swaying upright and fumbling with her seatbelt. She passes him the rest of her food and her Frosty, which is untouched, half-melted and disgusting-looking.

“This sucks,” she says under her breath as she gets out of the car. He grabs her by the elbow so she doesn’t bail.

“You’re good,” he assures her. “Couple hours, you’ll be fine.”

She makes it to her apartment on her own steam, even gets the keys in the lock herself, but he can tell she’s struggling. She starts trailing clothes behind her as soon as they get through the door. Jacket, boots, sweater — which freaks him out at first, until he realizes she has a t-shirt underneath.

“I’m just gonna lie down for a minute,” she calls. “I’m not sleeping.”

“Yeah, sure,” he replies, sitting down on her couch. He pulls his phone out, debating whether to call and ask about the warrant again. Judge Harrison can be a pain in the ass unless he likes you or someone puts in a good word for you, and Holder hasn’t been around long enough to get lucky on either count.

He can hear Linden getting into bed, tossing around in there or something, so he toes his boots off and calls Harrison’s office for something to do. He gets the same bored-sounding assistant as the last time he called and the same line about Harrison being in court.

Holder leans his head back against the couch and closes his eyes — just for a second, he tells himself — but he can already feel the pull of sleep deadening his limbs and making his mind go blank.

He jerks awake when Linden says something unintelligible from her bedroom. 

“You need something?” he calls, keeping his eyes shut.

“Water,” she calls back. He groans quietly, tempted to tell her to get it herself, but heaves himself up instead, wandering into her kitchen, opening cupboard doors until he finds her glasses, running the tap water until it’s cold enough.

He keeps his eyes low as he walks towards her bedroom, using his peripheral vision to locate her, because there’s something about being in her bedroom that makes him real antsy, in a vague kind of way. There’s not much to it, from what he can tell in the dark. A bed, a little table beside it, a chair heaped with clothes in one corner, and a stack of boxes in another corner that he recognizes from when Sonoma sent all her shit back.

She’s buried under the covers, so he takes a giant step in, awkwardly, as though just taking one step into her bedroom makes it less weird. He drops the water on a table beside the bed and takes another giant step back to relative safety, leaning against the doorframe. 

“Thanks,” she says from somewhere under the blankets. She’s looking at the water, not at him. “For this. You’re nice.”

“Oh  _ snap _ ,” he teases. He makes his voice high and girly, clearing his throat for effect. “Dear diary, on this day, Sarah Linden said thank you and called me nice —”

She peeks at him, her eyes half-lidded. “Shut up,” she says. She reaches for the water, talking into the glass. “Go find out about the warrant.”

“I  _ just _ called,” he says. “Literally talked to Harrison’s office like, two minutes ago. He hasn’t signed yet.”

Linden puts the water back and settles on her pillow, blinking slowly at him. “Call someone else. Call that new DA. She likes you.”

She’s slurring pretty good, and he cocks his head, not sure if he heard her right. “Say what?”

“The one with the brown hair,” Linden mumbles. “Christine. Catherine. I dunno.”

He casts around in his mind, coming up with a vague image of who he thinks she’s talking about. “Yeah?”

Linden’s eyes are closed now, half her face shadowed by a curtain of hair. He thinks she’s conked out, but he stands there for a minute longer anyway. She looks content when she’s sleeping, all comfortable and relaxed, without the layers of armor she throws up all day, every day. 

“Caroline,” she says suddenly, her eyes cracking open slightly, then closing again. “It’s Caroline.” 

“Caroline, huh?”

“Mmm hmm.” Linden’s voice is soft and dreamy, barely more than a whisper. “She watches you.”

“Nah,” he drawls, because he has  _ definitely _ not noticed this. “For real?”

Linden doesn’t say anything else. Her breathing is deep and slow. She’s out cold.

* * * * *

He doesn’t mean to pass out on Linden’s couch, but he wakes up to her standing in front of him, his brain scrambling to make sense of where he is, and why, and when. It feels like it’s only been a minute since he sat down.

“Shit,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes. “Sorry. What time is it?”

She wanders past him on half-speed and sits down on the opposite end of the couch, propping her chin on one pulled-up knee. “Three. Didn’t think I’d sleep that long. Did the warrant come through?”

He checks his phone, shaking his head. “I’ll call again in a few.”

He’s not quite ready to move yet. He’s slumped into her couch in the most perfect-feeling way, and the second he moves he’ll ruin it. He watches her stretch her neck, rolling her head from side to side. Then she opens and closes her left fist, over and over.

“Where’s it numb?” he asks. 

Her hand goes still, and he thinks for a second she isn’t going to answer, but she shifts slightly and glances over at him. “My entire left side,” she says. “Sometimes. It’s not all the time. Not totally numb, just … I can’t feel as much.”

He reaches over and taps her left hand where it’s resting on her knee, making a serious doctor-type face. He starts tapping his way up her wrist until she puffs out a laugh and flicks his hand off her. He chuckles, sitting up and leaning forward, scrubbing his face with his hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks after a minute. He turns his head to look back at her.

Her face is cautious, guarded. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

He levels a look at her, because they both know that’s a shitty answer. She shifts a bit, eyes on his back. “You know why,” she says, and yeah, he knows why she didn’t want anything official on her record on this one. Express lane to a desk job.

She looks back up at him. “And don’t say anything —”

“Linden. Come on. As if I would say anything.”

Her mouth twists a bit, and she ducks her head in a tiny nod.

They sit in silence on her couch, and he tries to figure out how to tell her that he wants her to talk to him about stuff, especially because he knows she doesn’t talk to anyone about hardly anything. But he doesn’t know how to say it, because even talking about the fact that she can talk to him makes her skittish.

“You can tell me whatever,” he says eventually. He’s tried to get her to understand this before, and he’s kind of at a loss at this point because she still doesn’t seem to get that. “I got you.”

She leans her head against the back of the couch, holding his gaze. “You’re not worried?” she asks.

“’Bout what?”

She gestures loosely with her left hand. “That I won’t be able to back you up?” Her tone is light, but he can see uncertainty in her face. 

“Nah,” he says, leaning back against the cushions again. “Maybe if you were a lefty…”

She smiles quickly, her eyes bouncing back to somewhere on the floor.

“For real, Linden,” he says quietly, “you’re the only one I want backing me up.” 

She keeps her eyes on the floor a moment longer, then turns to look at him, perching her chin on her knee again. He watches the minute back-and-forth of her eyes as she studies his face, her mouth turned up just a tiny little bit. “Thanks,” she says softly. “Me too.”

Something about the look on her face makes him swallow convulsively, and part of him wants to make a joke to get them back on familiar ground, because she never looks at him like she is right now.

His phone rings, and both of them jump. He coughs reflexively, digging it out of his pocket. 

“I’ll go get dressed,” Linden says, getting up from the couch. “We can swing by the courthouse on the way back in.”

“You got it, partner,” he says, flipping open his phone. She turns back and smiles at him, and he smiles back, giving her a thumbs up as Judge Harrison’s assistant tells him they can come in to get their signed warrant.

**Author's Note:**

> Much love to **stayseated** for outstanding beta commitment and general heroism.


End file.
